mintpressnews: (Nazi) Skinheads Come Out In Full Force At PA Trump Rally

Skinheads Come Out In Full Force At PA Trump Rally

An investigator for the Anti-Defamation League, who asked us not to publish his name, said Keystone United members are regulars at Trump events around the state. They wear their regalia, don’t bother hiding their tattoos, and cheer right along with everyone else as Trump bashes immigrants and calls for revolution.

Since its founding in 2001, Keystone United chapters have sprung up around the state. The group sells White Lives Matter bumper stickers on its website, which show up on street signs and newspaper dispensers. The investigator added that of skinhead groups operating on a state-level, Keystone United is one of the best-organized in the country. The Terrorism Research and Analysis Consortium concurs, describing them as “a well-organized, well-established, and increasingly violent group.” And its website shows little subtlety as to their ideology. A recent post, for instance, bemoans Andrew Jackson’s removal from the front of the twenty-dollar bill.

“The fact that Harriet Tubman can take his place without protest, symbolizes the apathy that has replaced our will to power,” it reads.

There’s also tons of anxiety about the Jews.

Keystone United isn’t the only white supremacist group to ride the anti-immigrant wave which buoys Trump. The ADL investigator added that a newer organization has recently materialized in Pennsylvania, imported from Finland: a group called Soldiers of Odin, which seeks to patrol and intimidate immigrant communities — particularly Syrian refugees, many of whom have recently settled in Pennsylvania’s Lehigh Valley.

White supremacy as a political and economic force is a major part of Pennsylvania’s history. It became highly visible in the state during the Great Migration — when millions of African-Americans moved from the South to the North and Midwest during the first two-thirds of the 20th century, many seeking Rust Belt factory jobs. James Peterson, the director of Africana Studies at Lehigh University, said many white workers didn’t want the competition, so they worked to intimidate them and shut them out. The Ku Klux Klan in particular was highly active in Western Pennsylvania in the 1920’s, as scholar John Craig has detailed. (They likely would have loved Trump; former KKK Grand Dragon Scott Shepherd told The Daily Beast in March that Trump is “pretty much in line with their beliefs.”)

Meanwhile, prisons became a significant industry in the state. Philadelphia’s Eastern State Penitentiary, built in 1829, provided a model of solitary confinement that hundreds of other prisons followed, as NPR details. In central Pennsylvania, a host of prisons sprouted up over the 20th century, where disproportionate incarceration of black men produced jobs for predominantly white communities.

“Economic depression, with the rise of prison industrial complex, create quite fertile ground for white supremacist ideology in the 21st century,” Peterson said.